“CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Tuesday he’s not convinced China will boycott Apple as part of the trade war with the United States,” Berkeley Lovelace Jr. reports for CNBC. “The Communist Party’s official People’s Daily warned on Tuesday that Apple and other U.S. firms could be vulnerable as ‘bargaining chips’ for Beijing.”

“Cramer, whose charitable trust owns shares of Apple, argued that China’s threat is like ‘playing with fire’ and that Apple remains one of the largest employers in the country,” Lovelace Jr. reports. “President Donald Trump is attacking what he sees as unfair trade on a number of fronts. Trump has asked his trade representative to consider increasing the proposed levies on $200 billion of Chinese goods up to 25 percent.”

MacDailyNews Take: The tariffs are not the end game. They are bargaining chips and, due to the trade imbalance, the U.S. has 376 billion more chips with which to play than China ($506B – $130B). Hence the empty rhetorical threats from China’s state-run media. China’s running out of chips already.

This initial negotiation phase too shall pass. The end result will be better than the starting point.

The United States is insisting that all countries that have placed artificial Trade Barriers and Tariffs on goods going into their country, remove those Barriers & Tariffs or be met with more than Reciprocity by the U.S.A. Trade must be fair and no longer a one way street!

I’m cognizant that in both the U.S. and China, there have been cases where everyone hasn’t benefited, where the benefit hasn’t been balanced. My belief is that one plus one equals three. The pie gets larger, working together. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, March 24, 2018

At least half of the popular fallacies about economics come from assuming that economic activity is a zero-sum game, in which what is gained by someone is lost by someone else. But transactions would not continue unless both sides gained, whether in international trade, employment, or renting an apartment. — Thomas Sowell, June 14, 2006

What the hell is Trump gibbering about? The US uses a massively disproportionate amount of the world’s resources and holds a massively disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth. Not doing too badly.